Glenna Manchego

On an October evening in Kharkiv, the Kharkiv Literary Museum hosted a poetry night in my residency apartment at Slovo Hause — the same building where the Ukrainian avant-garde once lived, wrote, and later died under Stalin’s repression. This time, the readers weren’t academics or professional writers. They were soldiers of Ukraine’s 2nd International Legion — men and women who fight by day and write by night. Their poems were raw, sparse, often unpolished — but honest.